The most powerful example I know of is the Temples that David Best originated and creates (some years) at Burning Man in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.
"To lead our design thinking we look to the idea of Counter-Monument. A phrase coined by James Young to define a new way of thinking about memorial/monument: The counter-monument’s aim is not to console but to provoke; not to embody permanence but change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored but to demand interaction; not to accept the burden of memory but to throw it back and demand response. The counter-monument accomplishes what all monuments should; it reflects back to the people and thus codifies their own memorial projections and preoccupations."
Fuerza Bruta | Cast & Creative. Rimini Protokoll - Home. Punchdrunk. Re:FACE, Anchorage Version. 2010 | Tmema (Golan Levin & Zachary Lieberman) Re:FACE [Portrait Sequencer], Anchorage Version (2007-2010: Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman) is a playful interactive video installation commissioned by the Municipality of Anchorage 1% for Art Program, for permanent display over the entryways of Anchorage East High School, Alaska.
Based on the Victorian "Exquisite Corpse" parlor game, and our previous small-scale prototype, the Re:FACE installation records and dynamically recombines brief video slices of its participants' mouths, eyes and brows. In this version of the installation, six large LCD screens — four over the school's North entrance, and two over the South — present an endless remix of face videos created by the students at East High. Students record their face videos using the project's custom Capture Station, located in the school's library. Anchorage East High School has one of the most diverse student populations in the United States. Ursonography. 2005 | Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin Ursonography (2005: Jaap Blonk and Golan Levin) is a new audiovisual interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, a masterpiece of 20th Century concrete poetry in which speech is reduced to its most abstract and musical elements. Dutch sound poet and virtuoso vocalist Jaap Blonk has performed the half-hour Ursonate more than a thousand times; in this presentation, Blonk’s performance is augmented with a modest but elegant new form of expressive, real-time, “intelligent subtitles.”
With the help of computer-based speech recognition and score-following technologies, projected subtitles are tightly locked to the timing and timbre of Blonk’s voice, and brought forth with a variety of dynamic typographic transformations that reveal new dimensions of the poem’s structure. The following 6'15" video at YouTube and Vimeo shows excerpts of the Ursonography performance from its premiere at the Ars Electronica Festival, September 2005 in Linz. Additional Resources. FIGMENT. Counter Monuments background/history. In February 2014, we launched a redesigned version of our website to better meet the needs of the Facing History and Ourselves community. As part of the transition to the new site, we have also taken the opportunity to review thousands of existing pages and do some house-cleaning. Some older pages were phased out, particularly pages and media that had become out of date editorially, or that no longer worked because of changes in technology.
In some cases, we have newer and more up-to-date materials available. If you're visiting this page, you may have used a link to one of these retired pages. We hope you will visit these pages to find our latest resources: For Educators and Educator Resources provide an in-depth starting place for exploring all our resources for educators. Other great tools to find what you need: Featured Projects Readings Resource Collections Publications Library We also have lots of features for our larger community, or those new to us. The Temple: Sacred Heart of Black Rock City. [Lee Gilmore teaches Religion & Anthropology at California State University Northridge and is author of Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man. This post is part of the Metropol Blog Series.] As travelers, historians, and archaeologists can tell you, great cities contain spiritual and ritual centers–physical manifestations of the human quest for the transcendent and magisterial.
Grand cathedrals, imposing temples, and mosques with soaring minarets–each an attempt to intersect both divine and earthly powers. For Black Rock City, that heart is perhaps best identified with the annual Temples–each an ephemeral locus of memory and mourning. Rod Garrett tells us that the origins of BRC’s famous layout of concentric circles lay in pragmatic and organic decisions. Temple of Tears, 2001 To lead our design thinking we look to the idea of Counter-Monument. David Best (sculptor) David Best (born 1945) is an internationally renowned American sculptor. He is well known for building immense temples out of recycled wood sheets (discarded from making toys and other punch-outs) for the Burning Man festivals, where they are then burnt to the ground in a spectacle of light and heat. Best received a master's degree in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he first took classes at the age of six.
His commitment to public art seems rooted in 1960s-era idealism. His works — ceramic sculpture, collages and more — have been shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [1], the Oakland Museum, the San Jose Museum of Art, diRosa and elsewhere. Best first began collaborating with others, 20 years ago, when he embarked upon a sideline: stripping down vehicles and giving them total sculptural makeovers, using recycled materials and found objects, often retrieved from dumps and dumpsters.
Best built his first Burning Man Temple in 2000, The Temple of the Mind. Charlie Todd: The shared experience of absurdity. David Binder: The arts festival revolution. Candy Chang: Before I die I want to... Participatory Art Blog. About | PlaySomething!